The imminent extinction of humanity is always good for a few laughs. While the death of any one individual inevitably inspires awe and dread at our common fate as mortal creatures, the extinguishing of billions of lives can, if presented deftly, produce an entertaining spectacle. Doomsday scenarios, whether in the form of marauding zombies or nuclear catastrophes, have long been a staple of popular entertainment, with the idea of universal destruction providing a frisson of anticipatory dread.

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam, the concluding volume of an expansive trilogy of novels set in the not-too-distant future, deals with the aftermath of a genetically engineered plague that exterminates the vast majority of the human species, leaving a scattering of survivors fending for themselves in the face of an uncertain future.

Described in such bare terms, you might think this a very depressing book, and it’s true that the earlier volumes in the MaddAddam trilogy, although not without moments of mirth, were generally dour reading experiences. Yet MaddAddam is unexpectedly and frequently an exhilarating and hilarious novel.

How does Atwood wring comedy out of her nightmare scenario? Partially, it’s a matter of tone. Her famously vinegary wit is always most pungent when scorning folly and venality, of which there is no shortage in the MaddAddam trilogy. The future imaged in these books is one where cupidity reigns supreme, with every appetite, no matter how debased and vile, ready to be fed for the right amount of money.

In the pre-plague world one of Atwood’s characters spends time working for “an anything-goes sex bazaar” where “you could get everything … from chicken soup to nuts, on or off the bone, screams-for-sale extra. He spent a nervous four weeks on that deathstar working for a pod of seedy Russian pussy-smugglers who were tiring of the whininess and bleediness and need-to-feed of their human merchandise.” The frequent references to kiddie porn and child abuse reinforce a sense of a universe where decency has disappeared. After sharing Atwood’s jaunty and unflinching gaze at such evils, a humanity-destroying plague comes as a welcome relief, like a cleansing Biblical flood.

One of the easiest ways to create comedy is to have a character who keeps doing the same thing over and over again even though the results are always disastrous. Think of Wile E. Coyote, forever coming up with elaborate schemes to catch the Roadrunner that always end with the mastermind falling off a cliff. In the MaddAddam trilogy, humanity is Wile E. Coyote writ large, with nature being the elusive Roadrunner that seems within our grasps but in the end evades capture. The trigger for the disaster in the novel is the actions of one man, a rather implausible mad scientist named Crake, but the real villain is the species as a whole, which is not just omnivorous but also meanly gluttonous, willing to brush aside any respect for others in the pursuit of pleasure.

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It’s not just Wile E. Coyote’s invariable failures that make him funny, but also his resilience. Every near-death scrape is followed by a comeback. Part of the comedy of MaddAddam is that humanity, despite the best laid plans of the lunatic Crake, displays a cartoon character’s ability to bounce back. The main movement of the novel concerns the reformation of a working community that includes not just a hardy band of human survivors but also their genetically engineered neighbours, including a race of super-intelligent pigs (pigoons) and a disconcerting tribe of post-humans called Crakers (whose genes are sculpted to keep them from having vices like meat-eating and jealousy).

The reconciliation of these separate sentient species is abetted by the shared task they all face of staving off some of the less wholesome humans who have also survived the plague.

Atwood’s great mentor Northrop Frye taught us that all of Western literature is based on the cultural DNA found in the Bible. Faithful to Frye, Atwood has, in the MaddAddam trilogy, essentially rewritten both the beginning and end of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, giving us both a new Genesis and a new Apocalypse. The trilogy is rich not just in Biblical references and invented futuristic religions but also in the primordial themes of Genesis: nature as a garden, sibling rivalry as a microcosm of human strife, humanity as a perpetually disobedient child. Like the Biblical God, Atwood is often wrathful towards her (or Her) creation, punishing them for their transgressions. But as in the Bible, Atwood also offers a promise of transcendence, perhaps not a new Heaven but maybe a new earth where her creatures can live in peace.

Like its distinguished predecessors Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), MaddAddam gives ample evidence of Atwood’s enviable literary talents. The fertility and ingenuity of her inventiveness are remarkable. The pigoons and Crakers will surely join the great bestiary of imaginary creatures that includes Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms, H.G. Wells’s Elois and Morlocks and Frank Herbert’s Sandworms. The sure-footedness of Atwood’s narrative skills is also striking. In all three novels she crafts a complex plot that weaves back and forth from the past to the future, yet the narrative momentum never abates.

Yet the MaddAddam books aren’t without flaw. One major problem is that Atwood relies heavily on coincidences, with her small cast of characters constantly running into each other both before and after the catastrophe. In the world of the novel, there are only a dozen odd human survivors, yet one of them is reunited with no less than three women he knew at a various stages of his pre-apocalyptic life. At one point a character argues that we live in “a universe in which — rightly understood — there are no coincidences.” This bit of new age hooey is unconvincing both as a philosophy and a narrative technique.

In her other fiction, Atwood is adept at creating plausible characters but in the MaddAddam trilogy her focus on inventing a credible future world seems to deflect her from imagining fleshed-out people. In an acute review of Oryx and Crake, John Clute, a commanding expert in the science fiction genre, noted that there was something “pulpish” in the depiction of Crake as a mad scientist. A similar reliance on genre clichés can be seen in other leading characters such as Oryx (an exotic and enigmatic foreign beauty) and Zeb (a major figure in MaddAddam, an adroit environmental adventure hero who seems like an improbable mix of Jason Bourne and David Suzuki).

Zeb’s lover Toby, a major figure in both The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, is one of the few exceptions to the general thinness of characterization in the trilogy. A hardy and wary survivor who comes to love late in life, Toby has a complexity that is only fleetingly present in other characters in the series.

Atwood’s ability to get us to care for Toby’s fate is what redeems the trilogy in the end, giving it emotional gravity that was previously missing. The sheer cleverness of the trilogy is entertaining but also makes the books at times feel cold and distant. Thanks to Toby, the trilogy gains that human dimension which only the best fiction possesses.

Jeet Heer’s book In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics will be published this month.